Climate maintenance

For more than two decades, Bank of America has aspired to environmental leadership in the financial
services sector. In 2007, we announced a 10-year, $20 billion business initiative to address climate
change through our lending, investing, products and services, and our own operations. This initiative
is far more than doing good for its own sake — it has proven to be a long-term, compelling business
opportunity for our clients, our company and our shareholders.

This volume, the first in a series, presents the findings of an ambitious
project—to measure the impact of fishing on the ecosystems
that make up the North Atlantic Ocean and to propose ways to mitigate
that impact. The project arose from a request by Dr. Joshua
Reichert, the Director of the Environment Program of the Pew
Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia, to answer six specific questions
about the North Atlantic:
• What are the total fisheries catches from the ecosystems, including
reported and unreported landings and discards at sea?...

In addition to documenting the uptake and diffusion of the three GGDP-generated maize technologies, this case study
provides valuable insights about the many factors that can affect the adoption of agricultural innovations in general. The
survey results show that adoption of improved production technology is directly influenced by three sets of factors:
(1) characteristics of the technology (e.g., complexity, profitability, riskiness, divisibility, compatibility with other technologies);
(2) characteristics of the farming environment (e.g.

There are also papers suggesting that the link between central bank finances and policy outcomes is
not straightforward, and that other aspects are crucial, too. For example, Ueda (2004) wrote:
“Summing up the experiences of insolvent central banks, my conclusion is that the maintenance of
a sound balance sheet is, in general, neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for fulfilling a
central bank’s responsibility, but there have been cases where an unhealthy balance sheet became a
major obstacle to price stability.

Ecosystems provide a wide variety of marketable goods, fish and lumber
being two familiar examples. However, society is increasingly recognizing the
myriad functions—the observable manifestations of ecosystem processes such
as nutrient recycling, regulation of climate, and maintenance of biodiversity—
that they provide, without which human civilizations could not thrive. Derived
from the physical, biological, and chemical processes at work in natural ecosystems,
these functions are seldom experienced directly by users of the resource.